Actual First Impressions (Delhi)

JUNE 21, 2017 - DELHI

Today we started our tour in earnest, by which I mean we spent 5 hours wandering around Old Delhi. I have read that it is best to avoid Delhi as your first destination in India as it is just incredibly overwhelming. I have walked though streets that smell like sewage and wet garbage (incidentally both of these were around the corner from where I lived in Israel) and I have walked through overcrowded open markets with vendors shouting at you to buy their wares and beggars running up to you to try to sell their wares. Old Delhi was all of these experiences together, and magnified. I suppose that’s what happens when you have a 1.2 billion population (16.7 million of whom live in the city of Delhi).

Where to begin? The electricity, perhaps? I have never seen a more precarious network of wires. There is no order. It seems that people with no electrical engineering experience decided to connect themselves haphazardly to the grid. The result is a sieries of nests of wires, some tangled together, some drooping low over the street, others broken and hanging exposed at about eye level. I am amazed electricution is not more common.

The streets were filled with an assortment of folks, mostly men as we were journeying early in the morning by Indian standards (we began touring around 8:30am, but most businesses don’t open until 10). Men on bikes and motorcycles and tuk tuks raced down the narrow streets (more about how traffic works in a subsequent post). Other men sat on the stoops drinking tea and eating breakfast or sat on the curb shinging shoes. Some men hung their laundry to dry from low-hanging electrical wires. A select few decided to shower with hose and bucket on a few street corners.

I am intrigued by the number of people who choose to walk in sandals through these streets. There is a not insubstantial amount of trash and other questionable material that collects in piles and puddles along the curbs. And, since people seem to use the sidewalk only about 20% of the time, it would seem desirable to want to keep your feet protected. But maybe that’s just my western sensibilities. People seemed to have no trouble walking barefoot through the complex of the old mosque or wading through ankle-deep water that collected in the streets after this afternoon’s monsoon rains. For now, I’ll keep my shoes laced up tight.

The final thing I want to mention is the stark contrast between today’s Old Delhi and old Old Delhi. On our walking tour, we went to a spice market (the largest open air spicce market in Asia, according to our tour guide). We walked up a small, dark staircase to get to the roof of the building so we could have a birdseye view of the market. The sites feature enormous bags of spices, scents of spices traveling through the air and making you sneeze... trash strewn about the rooves and the ground, peeling paint, shutters haning off their hinges, mold growing on the walls, and that underlying odor of the Tel Aviv shuk after dark (read: not a pleasant smell). The building’s architecture, however, was magnificant. Elaborately carved windows and domed rooftops. It must have been spectacular when it was first built.

It is only in the last few hundred years that India has been stripped of its title as a world economic power. For centuries, it thrived on trade in spices and teas. And, to me, buildings like these are a testament both to what India was and what India has become in many places. Perhaps this reflection is premature (I’ve not even been in the country for 36 hours and I have only seen one very small part). But these are my first impressions (of Delhi, at least).

On next to Varanasi, the silk capital of India!